One type of art instrument includes an internal reservoir portion for holding water, colored inks, paints, and other liquid art media (hereinafter collectively referred to as “application liquid”) and a brush portion connected to the reservoir portion wherein the application liquid passes to the brush portion in a controlled manner to be deposited onto a surface. Examples of such instruments include those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,536,969 (Nishitani) and U.S. Pat. No. 7,172,360 (McSweeney et al.) and the Art-Kure Watercolour System Colour Sketch Brush discussed in McSweeney et al. All of these references are incorporated by reference herein.
It has been found that a problem with such instruments, the application liquid is prone to leak out of the instrument when shipped via air, e.g., when exposed to low pressure at high altitudes.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have an improved art instrument that provides a controllable flow of application liquid and is substantially leak-proof when exposed to low pressure and thereby allows the instrument to be shipped via air without concern of leakage.
Moreover, these art instruments generally require removal of a component in order to activate the instrument, activation being the initial, manual procedure to allow for dispensing of application liquid by the instrument. For example, the instrument disclosed in McSweeney et al. has a ring between threaded parts with the ring preventing complete engagement of the threaded parts and thus dispensing of application liquid. The ring must be removed by the user to activate the instrument and this requires separation of the threaded parts from one another, removal of the ring therebetween and then re-threading of the parts together without the ring. This is a cumbersome procedure and necessitates additional effort to use the art instrument.